@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

TheIdOfAlan

@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io

Hi! I'm Alan. I've had the pleasure of working on the web for 20yrs and want to share that joy with everyone. The options for getting started kinda suck though.

So, I'm making a free, open-source site builder called Neopoligen. It's designed to make building your own site free and easy w/ no programming experience required.

You can learn more about it and follow along here if you're interested: https://www.neopoligen.com/

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

evan, to random
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

I would like to see a time loop movie, like "Groundhog Day" or "Palm Springs", but the loop is a full year instead of just a day.

I feel like at 12:01 on 1 Jan you'd vow to figure out a way out of the loop, and then by about mid-February you'd start procrastinating on the project, and then forget about it and just live your life.

And then a day or so after Christmas you'd be, like, oh shit, that's right, time's gonna loop again. I have to remember to break out next time!

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@evan Did you ever see "12:01PM"?

It goes the other way, just an hour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVooyfaPYD8

TheIdOfAlan, to rust
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

One of the things I've noticed about is that it's easier for me to get back to code I wrote a while ago

I'm working on something I haven't touched in months. I wasn't really sure where to start, but poked at a few things and then the error messages started showing up and I just followed them to where I needed to go

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

on yeah, and the tests too. I wouldn't have been able to figure out what I was doing without them

shanselman, to random
@shanselman@hachyderm.io avatar

Test

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@shanselman pong

TheIdOfAlan, to webdev
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

I'm moving further away from sub-domains. Largely because I'm thinking about the cost of moving them on a 20yr time line.

I'm still proud of this piece recommending them though, especially if it's hard to work in/on/under your primary domain:

https://www.alanwsmith.com/pages/28dakarf/

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@amxmln I shouldn't have said "cost" since that implies money.

I should have said "friction" in terms of time and effort deal with moving them (updating DNS entries, pointing everything to the right deployment processes, etc...)

Also, it takes a little bit to set each new one up vs if I'm just adding a page to my site there's none of the other hassle.

It's not a huge deal, but those little frictions can easily prevent me from doing something.

alda, (edited ) to random
@alda@topspicy.social avatar

Serious question: Do we really need to minify our JS and CSS files?

Does it matter at all if we're gzipping the HTTP streams anyway?

Edit: Just to be perfectly clear, by wondering if it matters, I'm not asking how many kb I may or may not be saving per request, but if it affects the user experience in a meaningful way like LCF due to large images with undefined dimensions does.

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@alda I ran samples from three CSS frameworks and what I have on my site. Diff was between 0.426 - 2,515KB

My site is the lower number. Since I'm building my own static site generator the question is active for me. It's a personal decision, of course. The trade off isn't worth it for me. Lots of other work to do that will be more impactful on the site (e.g. image optimization which will make way more of a size difference :blobfoxcomputer: :ablobfoxbongo: )

https://www.alanwsmith.com/pages/2admldfa/

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@alda As far as I can tell the only difference would be in the parsing stage between "characters" and "tokens" for the CSS. I pulled a very limited set of data. I couldn't tell a difference in the time it takes

https://www.alanwsmith.com/pages/2aeq40qn/

lauren, (edited ) to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

One of the aspects of commercial television series from the 60s and 70s (and to various extents somewhat later as well) was how producers didn't feel a need to score EVERY SINGLE SECOND OF EVERY SHOT.

Watching classics like "Columbo" and the original "Hawaii Five-0", you notice how the audio is so clear and conversations easy to hear and understand, without continuous music under (or sometimes over) virtually everything anyone is saying.

It's often noted how long these shows could go with a continuous shot without cutting, while "modern" shows feel a need for annoying multiple cuts per second much of the time.

But the audio issue is more basic. When there's a continuous score (whether or not low grade synthesizers are involved), just keeping track of what's being said can be a mess.

And this isn't just a problem for older viewers. Surveys are showing that a surprisingly high percentage of all age groups are now routinely leaving closed captioning enabled, the difficulty with hearing and understanding dialogue has become so intense on modern TV series and feature films (with the latter not even providing practical closed captioning in theaters in most cases).

"Can you hear me now?"

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@lauren same with the sound and good to know it's not just me

you got me thinking of a potentially interesting project of doing some analysis on how long unbroken shots are in different years of TV. It would be a heck of a thing to try to get the source material, but would be fun to see if someone managed it

Meyerweb, to random
@Meyerweb@mastodon.social avatar

https://variablefonts.dev is back, and looking sharp.

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@Meyerweb erm.io/
@zachleat

y'all might a kick outta this. I made a page with the Decovar variable font and randomly alter a variable every second and a half

https://decovar-random.alanwsmith.com/details

briankrebs, to random

I've spent a lot of time these past few weeks looking back at KrebsOnSecurity stories that are 10 years old or more. I'm blown away by how many stories back then didn't defang some non-malicious but otherwise very bad URLs that probably did not help the site's SEO or reachability. I'm wondering if I should even bother going back and trying to do it now.

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@briankrebs

Technical question:

Very Bad URLs

or

The Very Bad URLs

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@briankrebs I happen to collect new band names. some nerdy some not. If you're interested:

https://www.alanwsmith.com/band-names/

🎶 🎵 🎷 🎵 🎶

janerationx, to Georgia
@janerationx@mas.to avatar

TOUCHDOWN ! That's a good start!

@cfb

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@janerationx @cfb oof.

sophie, (edited ) to random
@sophie@social.lol avatar

okay, why would firefox be showing boxes with unicode instead of actual emojis in the live version of my blog, but not the same on localhost?

edit: a hard refresh seems to have fixed it, what

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@sophie one thing to check is the content encoding to make sure it's "UTF-8" and not something like "Latin-1"

Mrfunkedude, to random
@Mrfunkedude@mastodon.social avatar

Foo Fighters is the new dad rock.

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@Mrfunkedude KISS Guy agrees

matthiasott, to random
@matthiasott@mastodon.social avatar

If you have a personal website: what is your URL and why did you pick it? Is it your name? Is it a nickname/alias? Or something else? And are you happy with it or would you choose a different domain name today?

#personalsites #OwnYourWeb

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@matthiasott My site domain is my name.

I've had a bunch of other domains over the years, but a couple years ago I started moving them all to subdomains of my main site. The plan now is to slowly but surely move everything to the primary "www." (I wrote my own site engine and file format to make it easy to have directories operate as if they were independent sites.)

Main site:
https://www.alanwsmith.com

Other sites:
https://links.alanwsmith.com

chriscoyier, to random
@chriscoyier@front-end.social avatar

Jazz: https://chriscoyier.net/2023/10/23/jazz/

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@chriscoyier Love that the first related link is "Philips Hue Sync". Cementing its place as the classic jazz lightbulb

TheIdOfAlan, to rust
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

compilers should have a built in space invaders game to play in the terminal while they're doing their thing

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

Please congratulate me, I was about to look at the news but then decided maybe reading a good book is better.

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs one could argue reading a bad book is better too :revblobfoxread:

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

Well it’s working

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs confirmed

recursive, to random
@recursive@hachyderm.io avatar

Which static site generator will make me least angry if I just want a good-looking blog?

I need to stop finding reasons to procrastinate this indefinitely

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@recursive I had good luck with Hugo. Took a little fiddling, but nothing more than anything else as far as i can tell

TheIdOfAlan, to random
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

top reason I long for the days of a simpler internet: not having to post things in twelve different places

TheIdOfAlan, to random
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

i'm seeing stuff in my home feed by folks I don't follow and wasn't boosted. did something change, or am do I not understand how it works?

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@sarajw I might have figure out what's up. There's a "Discovery - Show Today's Trend" that was turned on the Appearance section of my Settings. I don't remember that before. I've turned it off so we'll see if that does it.

mdx, to random
@mdx@hachyderm.io avatar

have very quickly gone from "hosting my own web server" to "writing my own web server" again 🙃

TheIdOfAlan,
@TheIdOfAlan@hachyderm.io avatar

@mdx I'm writing my own static site generator. web server is next level. good hunting :blobfoxcomputer:

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